Jacqueline Susann's Shadow of the Dolls (27 page)

She turned and faced him. “Teach me,” she said.

She kept her eyes closed the whole time. He unwrapped a condom and began slowly. His weight was on his elbows. She was afraid to make a sound, afraid he might realize he was hurting her and stop before it was done. He was muttering in her ear, words she could not understand. At the end it hurt the most: he shoved hard three times and shouted.

Afterward he brought her a fresh glass of water and turned on the television. They watched music videos and didn’t talk.

“I have to go home now,” she said. Her shirt was still slightly damp. He gave her a T-shirt with a decal of a cartoon cat across the front.

“Do you need carfare?” he said. She shook her head. He called the front desk and ordered her a cab.

She went into the bathroom and rolled a toothpaste-covered finger around in her mouth. Her underwear felt sticky, but she didn’t want to look. She rolled up some tissues and stuck them between her legs. There was blood on her fingertips. She washed her hands and face with water so hot that it hurt. She looked at herself in the mirror. “Just fucked,” she said aloud. There were various soaps and lotions and hair products in black-and-white-striped containers. She slipped a bottle of hair conditioner into her pocket.

He wrapped a towel around his waist and walked her to the door. “You will always remember Gunther, and Gunther will always remember you.” He kissed her goodbye on the cheek, their first kiss. He didn’t say anything about taking her picture, and she didn’t remind him.

N
eely flipped through the catalog, looking for pictures of Jenn. There she was: in a big red cotton shirt and matching flip-flops, in a blue polka-dot sundress, in an oversize sweater that hung loosely around her hips. Neely couldn’t figure out why there was so much baggy clothing in this catalog; the models were all skinny and would have looked wonderful in tight clothes. But apparently that was their specialty, pretty much everything looked as if it had been borrowed from a boyfriend and been through the washer several times already. The models wore almost no makeup. Their hair was uncombed, and in several shots there was sand stuck to their legs and faces.

Neely ripped out the most striking photograph of Jenn, the one where she was looking just above the camera. There was something complicated in her eyes, something like a dare, something knowing and sad.
Sixteen-year-old girls aren’t supposed to look that way
, Neely thought.

Girls had to be absolutely perfect for these kinds of pictures, otherwise they’d just look like slobs. Neely remembered Anne’s old glamour shots: the foundation, the complicated lip colors, the twenty kinds of powder applied just so, every hair sprayed into place. Jenn was prettier than Anne, and these photographs proved it. Anne had needed so much help, but Jenn could be wearing nothing but lip gloss, they could throw dirt across her face, and she’d still be gorgeous. It gave Neely some satisfaction to think of Anne looking at these photographs of Jenn, realizing how beautiful her daughter was.

Something that gave Neely even more satisfaction: Anne was getting her eyes done! Anne had tried to keep it a secret, but Neely had finagled it out of her. So much for all that talk about aging gracefully! Television wasn’t like the movies; the lighting was terrible, and there wasn’t much you could get away with on videotape. Neely knew it had just been a matter of time. Look at Nancy Bergen—almost seventy, and her skin pulled so tight that you could bounce a quarter off her neck. Neely was dying to be interviewed by Nancy Bergen. All kinds of people won Oscars, and there were over fifty issues of
People
a year, but only the biggest stars got a full twenty minutes with Nancy Bergen. Maybe it was time to get a new publicist.

It was only seven in the morning, but Lyon had already left for the office. They were both working insane hours, Lyon waking up at the crack of dawn to get in early phone calls to New York, Neely on the set sometimes till eight in the evening. She came home too exhausted to go out and too wired to go to sleep. The cook left
meals in the refrigerator that Neely reheated in the microwave and then ate alone in front of the television set. She longed for some wine, one little glass to take the edge off her mood, but she was five pounds over her target weight, so Lyon wouldn’t let her have any alcohol. Some nights she stared at the ceiling for hours before falling asleep.

The movie wasn’t going well. The director had been replaced after the second week of shooting, and the script was being rewritten as they went. The film was set in the forties, and the producer was a stickler for period detail, so Neely had to wear a girdle in all her shots. It was an actual girdle from the forties: no Lycra, no spandex, just rubbery fabric that was hot as hell and stiff boning that dug into her flesh whenever she crossed her legs.

The car would be coming for her in forty-five minutes. She took a quick shower and got dressed. There was a blister on one of her toes (she had to wear period shoes as well) that looked as though it were about to burst. Where were the Band-Aids? She couldn’t find any in her bathroom or the boys’ bathroom, either.

She looked through Lyon’s medicine chest: nothing. Then she remembered that he kept a first-aid kit in his large brown suitcase for overseas trips. The suitcases were stored along the back wall of his walk-in closet, behind a rack of dress shirts. Neely realized that Lyon’s closet was about the same size as her first apartment in New York.

She sat on the floor and opened the suitcase. There were Band-Aids in three sizes; Neely picked medium and gently pressed it around her toe. There were all kinds of other stuff in the kit as well—three kinds of antacid, two full vials of antibiotics, various tubes of lotion, for bug bites, for itching, for burns, for cuts … Geez, Lyon was such a hypochondriac! But then most men were. There were not one but three Ace bandages! Something was wrapped inside one of them. Neely undid the little metal hooks and
rolled it across the floor: a vial of large white pills. It was Vicodin, prescribed by his dentist. The bottle was almost full, and the prescription was over a year old. “For pain,” the label read.

Neely couldn’t remember what she had heard about Vicodin. It was some souped-up form of aspirin, she guessed. Well, that girdle was going to hurt plenty. She worked up some spit and swallowed a pill. It probably wouldn’t last very long. She tucked the bottle into her jeans pocket and put back everything exactly as she had found it. Lyon wouldn’t miss the pills; he had probably forgotten all about them.

Just before she turned out the lights, she noticed the outline of the suitcase in the deep plush of the closet carpet.
Just in case
, she thought. She got the portable handheld vacuum from the linen closet and ran it over the carpet, walking backward, erasing her footprints as she went. She didn’t think any pill could work in five minutes, but she already felt better: happier, lighter, ready to face the day ahead. She heard the car arrive, and she skipped downstairs to meet it, singing all the way.

1995.

I
t was Anne’s favorite time of year: late spring, just a hint of hot weather on the noon breeze, the lilacs in full bloom, her favorite flower. She was in Connecticut for a long weekend of gardening and parties. Curtis and Jerry were visiting, their first official house visit. The two couples had had a few dinners in the city. It turned out that Jerry and Bill shared several enthusiasms: the architecture of Venice, the history of the spice trade, and an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the various recordings of Mozart.

“Jerry makes Bill feel smarter,” Curtis told Anne over the telephone, “and Bill makes Jerry feel straighter. The best friendships have been built on less.”

“Who would have guessed,” said Anne.

“And with them busy talking about
The Magic Flute
, you and I can gossip as much as we want. Oh Annie, we miss you out here. Are you really going to get married?”

“I really am. Eventually.”

“I want to be your bridesmaid.”

On Saturday morning Curtis and Jerry borrowed the Jeep to go shopping for antiques, and Bill headed for the golf course. Anne drove into town to pick up dessert.

It was a storybook Main Street, with a pretty steepled church at one end and an old stone library at the other. In between were offices and shops and two small restaurants that had been run by the same family for three generations. Anne went into the bakery and studied the selection.

She asked the clerk for a large chocolate cheesecake.

“Oh, we just sold the last one, just two seconds ago.” The clerk nodded toward the far end of the counter.

There was Nancy Bergen, watching the last chocolate cheesecake being slipped into a green-and-white-striped cardboard box.

“Be careful with the edges,” Nancy Bergen was saying. “Don’t crush it now.” She looked up. “Hello, Anne!” she cried, wiggling her fingers. “I saw you looking at this, and I knew I just had to have one!” They had been introduced, and then reintroduced, at several parties in the city. Each time Nancy said she would call Anne to schedule a lunch, but she never did. Anne knew she was too low in the pecking order. And everyone knew that Nancy didn’t really care for the company of women, unless the woman was married to someone extremely famous or accomplished.

“Yes, hello,” Anne said. Turning back to the clerk, she pointed to a plain cheesecake, of which there were several left. “Are you visiting for the weekend?” she asked Nancy.

Nancy dropped the name of the famous writer she was staying with. Anne knew he lived around here, but she had never seen him: unless their children were in school together, the artists and the bankers never mixed.

They left the shop together. Nancy was overdressed for the country, in camel-colored wool trousers and low patent-leather pumps.

“I believe I owe you a lunch,” she said in her famous rasp. “Do you have time?”

Bill wouldn’t be back from the golf course for another couple of hours. “I’d love to,” Anne said. They went to the Italian restaurant and ordered iced teas and Caesar salads. Nancy talked about her grandson, and a recent trip to Washington, and how much she was learning to love the Internet. Anne mostly listened.

“Such a pretty little town. So, tell me about this Bill,” Nancy said.

“He’s an investment banker. He grew up around here, actually. His family was—”

“A banker, how wonderful. My second husband was a banker.” Nancy told a long story about the year that New York City almost went broke. “I picked up my apartment for nothing in 1975. I mean, peanuts. You would die if I told you. Eight rooms on Park Avenue. Every night I go to bed and I tell myself, Nancy, you’ve come a long way from the Bronx! Where are you from, dear?”

“Lawrenceville, Massachusetts.”

“Of course, of course, how could I forget.” Nancy was staring at her eyes. “Dr. Barker?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Your eyes. Wonderful work. Dr. Barker, am I right?”

Anne didn’t know what to say.

“Oh, my dear, you don’t have to pretend with me.” She raised her arm like a traffic cop and then flicked her hand down from the wrist. Anne tried to figure out who Nancy reminded her of.
A gay man
, Anne thought.
She talks just like a gay man
. “We all do it. Dr. Barker is great with eyes, but when you’re ready to get the rest of it done, you call me and we’ll find you someone else. But what am I talking about? You look wonderful. You won’t have to worry about
that
for another three years at least.”

Nancy picked up the check. “This is a lovely little town, but I’d lose my mind if I came up here every weekend. But of course you
must love it. You and Bill.” She laid her corporate credit card on the china plate. “You know, we must get together for lunch in the city. I’m going to take you to the Four Seasons. We should be seen together, dear. Otherwise people will gossip. We don’t want them thinking we’re competitive, do we? Playing one network off against the other? People say such awful things about the women in our business. They pretend everything is one big catfight. And of course it isn’t that way at all, is it? You and I, after all, we do such different things. So different.”

“So very different,” Anne said. But it wasn’t true. They went after the same interviews all the time, and almost all the time Nancy won. And it would always be that way, Anne knew, whatever Keith Enright said.

A woman in tennis whites came up and asked for Nancy’s autograph. “You are such a dear,” Nancy said, taking out her heavy fountain pen. “And of course you’ll want Anne’s autograph, too.”

The woman looked at Anne but didn’t seem to recognize her. “Oh, sure,” she said. “That would be great.”

“Let me get a pen,” Anne said. She fished around her bag but couldn’t find anything. “May I?” she said to Nancy.

“Of course, dear. But not this one, they take a little bit of know-how, you don’t want to get any ink on those pretty fingers of yours.” She capped her fountain pen and took a cheap felt-tip out of her purse. “Here you go.”

They said goodbye on the sidewalk. “Aren’t the lilacs gorgeous?” Nancy said. “They were my favorite when I was growing up.”

“Mine too,” Anne said.

The sun was bright and hot on their faces. Nancy leaned close and tapped Anne’s forehead. “You go get some collagen for that, dear. It makes a world of difference. Even a monkey doctor could do it. You can ask Dr. Barker.”

*   *   *

I
love your meat loaf,” Curtis was saying. “You have to give me your recipe.”

“Never,” Mary said. “It’s a family secret.” There were eight of them altogether: Mary and Jim, Anne and Bill, Curtis and Jerry, and Diana and Dickie, who worked at the firm with Bill. They sat at a round pine table, drinking a good red that Dickie had brought up from the city.

“That’s not a family secret,” Curtis said. “A family secret is, I don’t know. Uncle Harry was an ax murderer. Or an embezzler. Or boyfriends with J. Edgar Hoover. Meat loaf is not a secret.”

“Well, it has a secret ingredient.”